We had the pleasure of hosting Gert Franz from Railo at our small central PA user group on July 31. He gave us a run-down of Railo for those that were new to it and demonstrated a bunch of the new features. I was particularly impressed with what they will be able to do leveraging Hibernate, and the ability to use just about anything as an archive and thus a virtual filesystem. The demos of the cfvideo/cfvideoplayer in conjunction with using an Amazon S3 to offload the majority of the load away from the webserver were also very cool. As one person put it, "I could do my own YouTube in 15 minutes!" Well, maybe a little longer than that, but it was pretty neat nonetheless. The video tags will not be part of the open source version coming later this year however, so will be interested to see what it will cost to use them.

I am currently running a client site on Railo and we seem to have worked out the few minor bugs with it on CFWebstore, and continue to be highly impressed with its speed, so I encourage everyone to look into it and what it offers. I think we are really going to be hearing more and more about Railo particularly once the open source is release on JBoss later this year, and this US tour is designed to really show CF developers what it has and get them excited about it. If you are looking at moving to a VPS or dedicated server, and the cost of ColdFusion is a big concern, Railo may be just the thing for you. Gert is also a member of the new CFML Advisory board so we can expect that they will continue to work hard to be compatible with Adobe ColdFusion as well. Talking with Gert you really are impressed by how strongly they believe in working as a community and attracting more people to the platform, rather than taking a "divide-and-conquer" approach. Exciting times for the CF community indeed!

For another nice write-up on the Railo presentation, visit Ben Nadel's blog.